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Time gains an extra dimension

By Marcus Chown

TIME ain’t what it used to be. A hundred years or so ago, we thought that the seconds ticked away predictably. Tick followed tock, followed tick. And clocks ran… well, like clockwork. Then along came Einstein and everything changed.

His theories of relativity dealt a blow to our naive ideas about time. Hitch a ride on a rocket travelling close to the speed of light, and time slows to a virtual standstill. The same happens if you park near a black hole and feel its awesome gravity. Even worse, space-time becomes so warped inside a black hole that space and time actually switch places.

Now just as we’re getting to grips with time’s weirdness, one daring physicist has dropped another bombshell. “There isn’t just one dimension of time,” says Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “There are two. One whole dimension has until now gone entirely unnoticed by us.”

Does this mean we can look forward to extra hours and seconds? Or will time’s second dimension play havoc with our notions of the past, present and future? Or is Bars, in fact, a few quarks short of a proton? One thing Bars’s extra time dimension does appear to reveal is the existence of deep and unexpected connections between disparate systems, such as atoms and the expanding universe. Such connections could point the way to a “theory of everything” that unites all the physical laws of the universe into one. Even better, Bars claims his theory has true predictive power and can be tested in upcoming particle physics experiments.